Ten years ago, to the day. March 24, 2001, the first official released version of Mac OS X went on sale, for USD 129. It was a massive step up and a massive step down from MacOS 9 at the same time - technically way more advanced, but clearly still in its infancy and pretty much unusable. Kernel panics, crashes, incredibly slow, and lacking many key features. It was so bad, in fact, that Mac OS X 10.1 was released as a free upgrade. Of course, we geeks know that Mac OS X is technically a lot older, but alas, let's just celebrate these 10 years. Maybe Lion will finally bring a usable non-crashing Finder!

I loved the early OS X's. They delivered what I wanted - an easy to use UNIX - something Apple managed to achieve after so many others failed.

The main drawback I remember with 10.0/10.1 is the compiler was so customized that it didn't compile a lot of open source code - including, frustratingly, gcc itself. So eventually I paid for 10.2, which IMO was OS X's high point.